[Hiring] Staff Software Engineer, GraphQL @Airbnb

Role Description

As part of the Application Platform pillar of Infrastructure, you will join the Viaduct team, which is a unified data access layer connecting most of Airbnb’s online data. Your mission will be to:

• Drive platform reliability and operational excellence by designing and implementing deployment pipelines, SLO frameworks, observability tooling, performance improvements, and AI-enabled incident response automation.
• Contribute to runtime resiliency initiatives including resource attribution, performance regression testing, and proactive monitoring.
• Architect and deliver AI-powered operational tooling that accelerates incident triage and empowers both the Viaduct team and tenant engineers.
• Shape the future of Viaduct Modern by contributing to the next-generation architecture and improving developer experience.

Qualifications

• 9+ years of software engineering experience, with significant depth in backend systems, distributed architectures, and platform engineering.
• Deep expertise in observability and monitoring, including experience designing SLO frameworks, distributed tracing systems, and metrics pipelines at scale.
• Proven track record in reliability engineering, with hands-on experience in incident response and root cause analysis.
• Strong experience with performance tuning and resource management in JVM-based systems.
• Familiarity with GraphQL or similar API gateway/data access layer technologies.
• Experience building developer tooling and platforms, focused on developer experience and self-service capabilities.
• Strong leadership and communication skills with the ability to partner effectively across teams.

Requirements

• Experience operating critical, high-traffic systems with a focus on deployment safety and automated rollbacks.
• Ability to investigate and resolve complex production issues by analyzing distributed traces and system metrics.
• Experience designing and implementing observability features and tooling for deployment triage.
• Ability to lead technical design discussions and RFCs for various initiatives.
• Contribute to open-source Viaduct by ensuring platform improvements are generalizable and well-documented.

Benefits

• Base pay range: $204,000 — $255,000 USD.
• Eligibility for bonus, equity, benefits, and Employee Travel Credits.

Company Description

Airbnb was born in 2007 and has since grown to over 5 million hosts who have welcomed over 2 billion guest arrivals globally. The Viaduct team is a very tenured and experienced team, setting best practices and next-gen architecture for Airbnb.